Host families help Tribe minor-leaguers feel right at home

Joshua Gunter/Plain DealerFormer Mahoning Valley pitcher Garrett Rieck, left, and current Scrappers outfielder Corteze Armstrong have benefited from having host parents Joe and Lisa Zarick. Host families help minor-leaguers with a place to stay and food.

For a couple of minor-league ballplayers, Garrett Rieck and Corteze Armstrong live a pretty charmed life.

Joe and Lisa Zarick do their laundry. The Zaricks cook and buy groceries for them. They use the couple's hot tub and in-ground pool anytime they want. And when they need some wheels, the Zaricks hand over the car keys.

"They spoil me rotten," said Rieck, a 22-year-old pitcher who until last week was with the Indians' Class A Mahoning Valley Scrappers. (Rieck just got called up by the Class A Lake County Captains).

And the Zaricks, whose basement walls display framed collages of players who have stayed with them, are happy to do it. They look forward to the summer baseball season, when the boys move back in so they can shower them with parental affection for a few months.

"I wouldn't trade it for anything," said Lisa Zarick, who always has a pan of brownies waiting for the guys when they return from road trips.

The minors are a grind, with tiring bus trips to Podunk towns and a pauper's per diem. But sometimes, generous folks like the Zaricks step up to help smooth the edges.

In Niles, near Warren, where the Scrappers play in a quaint, 6,300-seat ballpark behind a shopping mall, host families adopt the Indians' newest draftees and other raw talent. They provide a place to live and a whole lot more during a 76-game season that runs from mid-June through early September.

Rent support

The Scrappers have 30 players; 25 are in uniform for games. About 15 families signed up to house them this season. Many, including Denise and Ken Abell, who live three miles from Eastwood Field, have done so for years.

This summer, pitcher Mike McGuire and outfielder Donnie Webb, both 22, occupy the room with twin beds in the Abells' four-bedroom house.

Denise Abell, whose grown daughter and only child lives out of state, rattles off the names from the past seven seasons as if they're her grandsons - a list that starts with outfielder Jonathan Van Every, now in the Boston organization, and includes Class AAA Buffalo pitcher Aaron Laffey.

"Aaron was a little cocky," said Abell, vice president of the Scrappers Backers, a community group that supports the team. "But it wasn't a mean cocky. It was like he knew he was going to make it."

Host families get tickets to each home game and discounts on team merchandise, but otherwise don't get paid. In fact, providing a place to stay usually costs them money in food, gas and other staples.

Players stay rent-free. If not for these families, they would have to pay for hotel rooms or rent apartments.

"That's big," said Laffey before a recent game. "You're talking $500 to $600 [paychecks] every two weeks, after taxes. So that's a month's rent in one paycheck."

They are family

For many prospects drafted out of high school or discovered on dusty foreign ball fields, playing for the Scrappers is their first experience away from home.

Patti Bixler still remembers meeting the four Venezuelan boys who pooled their money to rent an apartment and walked at least a mile back and forth to the ballpark because they didn't have a car.

She offered to house them all, but her husband Bob balked. So they took in Dennis Malave, who was the only one who could speak a little English; some kid named Victor Martinez; and found homes for the other two.

The players became so close to the Bixlers that they've remained in touch and refer to them as "Mom" and "Dad."

"It doesn't go more than a week [without talking]," said Malave, the Indians' bullpen catcher who visited the Bixlers on a recent off day. "It's not a host family anymore, it's my family."

One summer, the Bixlers had five players and a coach living there. They filled sleeper sofas and a fort-style playhouse with bunk beds out back.

"I'm not a baseball fan," said Patti Bixler, a retired registered nurse and mother of four. "I didn't take the boys in because of who they were or what they would become. They needed a home."

Summer camp

Even players arriving from college require an adjustment.

Indians first baseman Ryan Garko said he lived in a dorm all four years at Stanford University. The former catcher went from playing in the 2003 College World Series to suddenly living upstairs in a stranger's house.

But Mike and Bonnie Wilson, who have hosted about a dozen players through the years, quickly became surrogate parents.

During the season, Mike Wilson made scrapbooks for the boys from articles and pictures in the local paper. Bonnie was the little voice who cautioned them about the groupies who hung around after games.

For road trips, families packed coolers for their players to take with them on the bus. Bonnie designed a form for their players to fill out, right down to the type of sandwich meat and bread they wanted. The Wilsons, who have three grown children from previous marriages, would have their food, drinks, snacks, pillow and blanket ready to go as the running bus waited for the players to board.

"It was like sending them off to summer camp," she said.

Five years later, the Wilsons ride around town in their Saturn hybrid with a sign on a side rear window: "Proud host family of #25 Ryan Garko." It's to convince others to give hosting a try because, most seasons, the Scrappers struggle to find enough families.

They even tried to plan Sunday meals - pasta, maybe a roast - so they could sit down and eat together like a family.

"If it wasn't for them," Garko said before a recent Indians game, "we'd have been eating at McDonald's or IHOP every night."

Hosts aren't required to provide meals, do laundry and offer parental counseling. But most do.

"It's like having another child," Abell said, "except I hope they don't act like one."

Sometimes they do.

There was the time a player moved a big-screen television and scratched a family's valuable oak cabinet. The time a kid spent the night puking in a host's front yard. And the time a player came home with a woman at 1:30 in the morning, shouting for his teammate. (He was sent packing.)

"That's the first thing we tell them," said Joe Zarick, who grills out for the boys and whips up pancakes and eggs on weekends. "Treat this place like it's your place."

After giving a few 20-somethings the run of the place for a summer, it's ridiculous to imagine that the hardest part comes when the season ends. But saying goodbye is awful, the host families say.

Lisa Zarick cried the whole ride back from Akron-Canton Airport after dropping off a player that first year. Her husband Joe admitted he even shed a tear or two. They never had children of their own.

So the Zaricks, who still get wedding invitations and Christmas cards from their players and have met many of their real parents, make sure the boys leave with a house key.

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